Book: The Blue Pavilions

S >> Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller Couch >> The Blue Pavilions




Captain Barker took the volume.

"But I shall never live to finish it."

"We hope not. The beauty, however, of this history will be that at
any point in its progress we may consult it for Tristram's good, and
learn all that, up to that point, God has given us eyes to see.
It may be that in deciding to make him a gardener we have been
mistaken. That book will enlighten us."

"There's one blessing," said Captain Barker, tucking the book under
his arm; "whatever pursuit the boy may follow, he'll want to follow
it unmolested. And therefore, in any case, I must teach him to use
the small-sword."

During the first few months, almost every entry in the Captain's
green volume dealt with Tristram's appetite. Nor did this fluctuate
enough to make the record exciting. He was a slow, phlegmatic
infant, with red cheeks and an exuberant crop of yellow curls.
He slept all night and a good third of the day, and, beyond cutting
ten teeth in as many months, exhibited no precocity. Nothing
troubled him, if we except an insatiable hunger. He was weaned with
extreme difficulty, and even when promoted to bread and biscuits and
milk puddings, continued to recognise his nurse's past service and
reward it with so sincere an affection that the woman accepted an
increase of wage and cheerfully consented to stay on and take care of
him.

Captain Barker saw nothing in all this to shake his first resolution
of making the boy a gardener, but rather found in each successive day
a reason the more for making haste to learn something about
horticulture himself, in order that when the time came he might be
able to teach it. At length he took counsel with Narcissus Swiggs
and unfolded his desire.

Mr. Swiggs listened sleepily, and as soon as his master had done gave
him a month's notice.

"What the devil's the use of that?" Captain Barker asked.

"I thought you weren't satisfied, that's all."

"If I weren't, I should kick you out without half these words.
You've been thinking of yourself all this while."

"I mostly does."

"Then don't, while I'm talking." And Captain Barker explained his
scheme a second time.

"No use," pronounced Mr. Swiggs at the close, shaking his head
ponderously.

"Why not?"

Mr. Swiggs swept his hand before him, summing up the whole landscape
with one majestic semicircle.

"Where is your soil?" he asked. "And where is your water?
Springs?"--he paused a couple of seconds--"There ain't none. All
that mortal man can do, I does."

"And what is that?"

"I does without."

"But the marsh behind us--"

"Salt."

"Narcissus Swiggs, you have been in my service twenty years."

"Twenty-three."

"During that time you have once or twice argued with me. I ask you,
as a Christian man, to tell me truly what you got by it."

"Naught."

"Just so. On this occasion, however, I've listened with great
patience to all your objections--"

"Not a tithe of 'em."

"They're all you'll have a chance of making, at any rate. And I
answer them thus: If the worst comes to the worst, I'll cover the
whole of this property with a couple of tubs, one to catch rain-water
and t'other filled with garden mould. If the sea rots 'em, I'll have
the whole estate careened, and its bottom pitched and its seams
stopped with oakum. I'll rig up a battery here, and if the
water-butt runs dry you shall blaze away at the guns till you fetch
the rain down, as I've seen it fetched down before now by a
cannonade. But I mean to have a garden here, and a garden I'll
have."

Faithful to this resolve, Captain Barker set to work to study the art
in which Tristram was to be instructed, and, being by nature a hater
of superficiality, determined to begin by acquainting himself with
everything that had been written about the nature and habits of
plants from the earliest ages to that present day. He engaged a
young demy of Magdalen College, Oxford--son of Mr. Lucas, saddler, of
the High Street, Harwich--who was much pinched to continue his
studies at the University, to extract and translate for him whatever
Aristotle, Theophrastus and others of the Peripatetic school had
written on the subject; to search the college libraries for
information concerning the horticulture of China and Persia, the
hanging gardens of Babylon, those planted by the learned Abdullatif
at Bagdad, and the European paradises of Naples, Florence, Monza,
Mannheim and Leyden to draw up plans and a particular description of
the Oxford Physic Garden, by Magdalen College, as well as the
plantations of Worcester, Trinity and St. John's Colleges; and to
ransack the bookshops of that seat of learning for such works as
might be procurable in no more difficult tongue than the Latin.
In this way Captain Barker became possessed of a vast number of
monkish herbals, Pliny's _Historia Naturalis_, the _Herbarum Vivas
Eicones_ of Brunsfels, the treatises of Tragus, Fuchsius, Matthiolus,
Ebn Beithar and Conrad Gesner, the _Stirpium Adversaria Nova_ and
_Plantarum seu Stirpium Historia_ of Matthew Lobel, with the works
of such living botanists as Henshaw, Hook, Grew and Malpighi.
As the Captain had no thought of resuming a seafaring life,
he felt confident of digesting in time these masses of learning,
though it annoyed him at first to find himself capable of
understanding but a tenth of what he read. On summer evenings he
would sit out on the lawn, with a folio balanced on his knee, and do
violence to Mr. Swiggs's ears with such learned terms as
"Boraginiae," "Cucurbitaceae," "Leguminosae," and as winter drew in,
master and man would hold long consultations indoors over certain
plants, the portraits of which in the herbals seemed familiar enough,
though their habitats often proved, on further reading, to lie no
nearer than Arabia Felix or the Spice Islands. Nevertheless, they
took some practical steps. To begin with, the soil of the garden
before the Blue Pavilion was entirely changed--Captain Barker
importing from The Hague no less than thirty tons of the mould most
approved by the Dutch tulip-growers. A tank, too, was sunk at the
back of the building towards the marsh, as a receptacle and reservoir
for rain-water; and by Tristram's fourth birthday his adoptive father
began to build, on the south side of the house, a hibernatory, or
greenhouse, differing in size only from that which Solomon de Caus
had the honour to erect for the Elector Palatine in his gardens at
Heidelberg.


Meanwhile Captain Runacles, who watched these operations from
the other side of the privet hedge and picked up many scraps of
rumour from the antique Simeon, was consumed with scorn and envy.
The two friends no longer spoke. At the back of the Fish and Anchor,
across the road, there stretched at this time the largest and fairest
bowling-green in the east of England--two good acres of smooth turf,
stretching almost to the edge of the sea-cliff, on which side the
wall was cut down to within a foot of the ground, so that the gossips
as they played, or sat and smoked on the benches about the green,
might have a clear view of the ships entering or leaving the harbour,
or of others that, hull-down on the horizon, took the sunset on their
sails. Hither it had always been the custom of the two captains to
repair at the closing in of the day, and drink their beer together as
they watched this or that vessel more or less narrowly avoiding the
shoals below. Nor would they commonly retire, unless the weather was
dirty, until the sea-coal fire was lit above the town-gate and the
lesser lighthouse upon the town-green answered with its six candles.
Now, however, though they met here as usual, no salutation was
exchanged. On benches as far apart as possible they drank their beer
in silence and watched the players. The situation was understood by
everybody at the inn; and at first some awkward attempts were made to
heal the breach. But Captain Jeremy's scowl and the light in Captain
John's green eyes soon convinced the busybodies that they were
playing with fire, and likely to burn their fingers.

In his home Captain Runacles grew restless. To cure this, he set to
work and finished a large dial which he had long intended to present
to the Corporation of Harwich, to set up over the town-gate.
The Corporation accepted the gift and employed their clerk to write a
letter of thanks. The language of this letter was so flattering that
Captain Runacles made another dial for the Exchange. Being thanked
for this also, he presented an excellent pendulum clock of his own
making, to be placed over his Majesty's arms upon the principal gate
of the dockyard, with a bell above the clock to strike the hours of
the day, as well as to summon the men to their work; and two more
dials, the one for the new town-hall, the other for the almshouses
near St. Helen's Port. Again the Corporation thanked him as
profusely as before, but asked him to be at the expense of affixing
these dials, which, both by their beauty and number, were rapidly
making Harwich unique among towns of its size. Upon this Captain
Runacles, in a huff, forswore all further munificence, and applied
himself to the construction of a pair of compasses capable of
dividing an inch into a thousand parts, and to the sinking of a well
in the marsh behind his pavilion. The design of this well was
extremely ingenious. It was worked by means of a wheel, nine feet in
diameter, with steps in its circumference like those of a treadmill,
and so weighted that by walking upon it, as if up a flight of stairs,
a person of eleven or twelve stone would draw up a bucket--two
buckets being so hung, at the ends of a rope surrounding the wheel,
that while one ascended, full of water, the other, which was empty,
sank down and was refilled. These buckets being too heavy for a man
to overturn to pour out the water, he bored a hole in each, and
contrived to plug the holes so that the weight of the bucket as it
bumped upon the trough prepared for it at the well's edge jogged out
the plug and sent the water running down the trough into whatever
pail or vessel stood ready to catch it. Nor is it astonishing that
he lost his temper when, after these preparations, he found the well
was not deep enough, and the water as much infected with brine as if
he had gathered it from the surface of the marsh.

It was on the day following this disappointment that, while walking
to and fro the length of his turfed garden, between three and four in
the afternoon (for his habits were methodical), he heard a child's
voice lifted on the far side of the party hedge:

"Dad!"

"Eh? What is it?" answered the voice of Captain Barker, from his new
tulip-bed, across the garden.

"What thing is this?"

"A nymph." Captain Runacles guessed by this that the four-year-old's
question had reference to one of the figure-heads disposed along the
hedge.

"What is a nymph?"

"A sort of girl."

"I don't like this sort of girl. She's got no legs."

"Come over here and look at this tulip."

"There's a much better sort of girl next door," Tristram continued,
unheeding.

"What do you know about her?" sharply inquired his guardian.

"Oh, I see her often at the top window, and sometimes out walking.
Nurse says we're not to speak, so we put out our tongues at each
other."

"Tristram, come over here and look--"

"She's got funny curls, and puts her doll to bed in the window-seat
every night. I like that sort of girl. When I grow up," the young
bashaw proceeded, "I shall have lots of that sort of girl all over
the garden, instead of these wooden things."

Captain Barker treated this Oriental day-dream with silence.

"Dad--why am I worth more than all the girls in the world?"

"Who said you were?"

"Nurse. She says you think so. She says the big man next door would
give his eyes to have a boy like me; but he can't make nothing of a
girl, and don't try. Narcissus--"

"Hallo!" replied the heavy voice of Mr. Swiggs.

"Have you got a boy?"

"No, sir: 'nmarried."

"What did you give your eye for, then?"

"Losh!" ejaculated Narcissus, as Captain Barker pounced on the
youngster and haled him off to the tulip-bed. The interrogatory was
stayed for a while.

Captain Runacles, who had caught every word, strode half a dozen
times up and down his grass-plot: then summoned Simeon.

"Tell nurse to send Miss Sophia down to me."

Five minutes later a small child of seven appeared in the doorway,
and, after hesitating there for a moment, stepped timidly across the
turf. Her figure and movements were ungainly and her complexion
appeared unnaturally sallow against a dark grey frock. A wet brush,
applied two minutes before with inconsiderate zeal, had taken all the
curl out of her dark hair and smoothed it in preposterous bands on
either side of her brow. Her arms hung stiff and perpendicular, and
she fidgeted with her short skirt as she advanced.

Captain Runacles stopped short in his walk and surveyed her.

"H'm," he said. "Don't shuffle."

The little girl looked up, dropped her eyes again quickly, and let
her hands hang limp beside her. She was shaking from head to foot.

"You are a girl."

"Pardon, father," she mumbled in a low whisper.

"Next door there lives a small boy. You are in the habit of putting
out your tongue at him. Why?"

"I--I--"

Her voice wavered and she broke into a fit of sobbing.

"Tut, tut! Stop that noise; I haven't scolded you. On the contrary,
I sent for you in the hope that you might always be able to put out
your tongue at that boy. Sophia, dry your eyes and attend, please.
Would you like to be an accomplished woman?"

"If it please you, father."

"Now may the devil fly away with the whole sex! If they _do_ happen
to desire anything good in itself, it's always to please some man or
another. Sophia, I ask you if, for your own sake, and for the sake
of knowledge, you will be my pupil; if you care to pursue--" Captain
Runacles checked himself, not because he had any idea that he was
talking over the head of a girl of seven, but because a general
proposition had occurred to him.

"Woman's notion of a pursuit," he said, clasping his hands behind him
and regarding his daughter's tear-stained face with severity--
"woman's notion of a pursuit is entirely passive. Her only idea is
to be pursued, and even so her mind runs on ultimate capture.
Sophia," he continued, himself forgetting for the moment his view of
knowledge as _sui causa optandum_, "would you like to please me by
licking that boy across the hedge into a cocked-hat?"

"But--oh, father!"

"What is it?"

She could not answer for a moment. Nor did he know that she besought
God every night to change her into a boy that she might find some
grace in his sight.

"You have one advantage," said her father coldly, as she struggled to
keep down her tears. "Your rival across the hedge is in a fair way to
be turned into a fool. We will begin to-morrow. In a week or so I
shall be able to pronounce some opinion on your capacity. Now run
indoors to your nurse--why, bless my soul!"

The child had trotted forward, and, taking his hand, kissed it
passionately. He looked into her face, and, finding it white as a
sheet, lifted her in his arms and carried her into the pavilion.



CHAPTER IV.


THE TWO PAVILIONS (continued).

"We must have an apiarium," Captain Barker announced a week later.

"What's that?" Mr. Swiggs asked.

"Half a dozen beehives, at least."

"No room."

"There is nothing," pursued Captain Barker, "that gives such
character to a garden as an apiarium unless it be fishponds.
I will have both."

"No water."

"The fishponds shall be constantly supplied with running water.
I will have three ponds at different levels, connected with miniature
waterfalls and approached by an _allee verte_. The glimpse of water
between green hedges will be extremely refreshing to the eye.
The apiarium shall stand close to these ponds--as Virgil commends:"

At liquidi fontes et stagna virentia musco
Adsint, et tenuis fugiens per gramina rivus

"--And shall be surrounded with beds of violets and lavender and such
blue flowers as bees especially love. When, Narcissus, I glance over
the hedge at the back of the house and behold Captain Runacles' two
acres lying waste, cumbered like a mining country with the ruins of
his mechanical toys, I have a mind to--"

"He'll neither sell nor lend."

"I perceive that in time we must set about draining so much of the
marsh outside as belongs to me. There, if anywhere, the fishponds
must lie. In the meantime there is a full rood of ground beyond the
northern hedge that we may consider. By cutting a path through the
privet there and enclosing this parcel, we gain for our bees a
quadrangle which will not only give them their proper seclusion, but
may be planted in the classical style without detriment to the
general effect of our garden. The privet serving as a screen. . . ."

Invigorated by Mr. Swiggs's opposition, the little man continued for
twenty minutes to revel in details, and ended by rushing his
companion off to examine the ground. In his hot fit he forgot all
about Tristram, who, tired of listening, had slipped away among the
gooseberry-bushes, with a half-eaten slice of bread and butter in his
hand.

The fruit proved green and hard--for it was now the third week of
May--and by the time his bread and butter was eaten the boy had a
fancy to explore farther. He wandered through the strawberry-beds,
and, finding nothing there but disappointment, allowed himself to run
lazily after a white butterfly, which led him down to the front of
the pavilion, over the parterres of budding tulips and across to an
east border gay with heart's-ease, bachelor's buttons, forget-me-nots
and purple honesty. The scent of budding yews met him here, blown
softly across from Captain Runacles' garden. The white butterfly
balanced himself on this odorous breeze, and, rising against it,
skimmed suddenly over the hedge and dropped out of sight.

Now there was set, under an archway in this hedge, a blue door, the
chinks of which were veiled with cobwebs and the panels streaked with
the silvery tracks of snails. By this _pervius usus_ (as Captain
Runacles called it) the two friends had been used to visit each
other, but since the quarrel it had never been opened. No lock had
been fixed upon it, however. Only the passions of two obstinate men
had kept it shut for four years and more.

The child contemplated this door for a minute, then lifted himself on
tip-toe and stretched his hand up towards the rusty latch. It was a
good six inches above his reach.

He glanced back over his shoulder. Nobody was in sight. His eyes
fell on a stack of flower-pots left by Narcissus beside the path.
He fetched one, set it upside-down in front of the door and climbed
atop of it.

This time he reached the latch and lifted it with some difficulty.
His weight pressed the door open and he fell forward, sprawling on
hands and knees, into the next garden.

He picked himself up, and was on the point of fetching a prolonged
howl, but suddenly thought better of it and began to stare instead.

Barely six paces in front of him, and in the centre of a round
garden-bed, a small girl was kneeling. She held a rusty table-knife,
the blade of which was covered with mould; and as she gazed back at
him the boy saw that her face was stained with weeping.

"Hallo!"

"Hallo!"

"I was just thinking of you, little boy, and beginning to despise
you, when plump--in you tumbled."

"But, I say--look here, you know--I've been told what despising is,
and if you despise me you ought to say why."

"Because I've been ordered to. I'm going to do it out of this book
here. Listen: 'A point is that which has no parts and no magnitude,'
and that's only the beginning. Oh, my dear, I'll wither you up--you
just wait a bit!"

She dug the knife viciously into the earth.

"I don't care," said Tristram affably.

"P'r'aps you don't know what 'Don't Care' came to?"

"No, I don't."

"Well, he came to--a place. It was a good deal deeper down than this
hole I'm digging."

"What's the hole for?"

"My doll, here. I've got to put away childish things; so I'm going
to cover her right up and never see her face again. Oh! oh!"

She began to sob as if her heart would break.

"I wouldn't cry if I were you. I didn't cry just now when I tumbled
off the flower-pot."

"You don't know what it is to be a mother."

"No, but I can dig ever so much better than you. Look here.
I've got a spade of my own, and I'll show you how to dig properly, if
you like."

He ran off and returned with it in less than a minute. In another
minute they were engrossed in the burial rites, the girl still
playing at tragedy, but enjoying herself immensely.

"We must read something over the remains," she announced.

"Why?"

"Because it's always done, unless the dead person is buried with a
stake through his inside."

"Then we'd better take her out again and put a stake through her;
because I can't read."

"Haven't you begun to learn yet?"

"No."

"Well," said Sophia, picking up the Euclid, "you can hold a corner of
the book and listen to what I read, and perhaps you can repeat some
of it after me, you contemptible boy."

They were standing over the doll's grave, side by side, and chanting
in antiphon the fourth proposition of the First Book of Euclid, when
Captain Runacles came round the corner of the house and halted to rub
his eyes.

At the sound of his footstep on the gravel Sophia snatched the
book from Tristram and looked desperately round. It was too late.
Her father was glaring down upon them both, with his hands behind him
and his chin stuck forward.

"You miserable child!"

He pronounced it deliberately, syllable by syllable, and turned upon
Tristram.

"Will you kindly explain, sir, to what I owe the honour of your
presence in my garden?"

Tristram, who had never before been addressed with harshness, failed
to understand the tone of this speech, and answered with amiable
directness--

"I tumbled in, off a flower-pot."

"Indeed!"

"Yes; and I stayed because I liked the girl here."

"You do her infinite honour."

"I'm going away now because I'm hungry. But I'll come back again
after dinner, all right."

"No," said Captain Runacles grimly; "on that point you must allow me
to correct you. You infernal young cub, if I catch you here again--"

"Hi! Captain!" interrupted a voice at the foot of the garden.

Doctor Beckerleg stood beside the blue gate and held it open to admit
another visitor, whose dress and appearance were unfamiliar to the
Captain. He paused midway in his threat and removed his eyes from
the children. Sophia crept towards the house, while Tristram seized
his opportunity and slipped away to the safe side of the privet
hedge.

"Let me present," said the Doctor, "Mr. Josias Finch, of Boston, New
England."

"Attorney-at-law," Mr. Finch added, lifting his hat politely.

He was a little man with a triple chin and small, intelligent eyes
that twinkled deep in a round, fat face. His dress was of a
slate-coloured material, decorated with silver buttons, and he wore a
voluminous wig.

"With news for you, Captain."

"Important news," Mr. Finch echoed. He pulled out a silver snuff-box
and offered it to Captain Runacles. "You don't indulge? But you
will suffer me, no doubt. Ah," he went on, inhaling a pinch, "it has
been a long journey, sir, and my stomach abhors sea-voyaging."

"Shall we step into the house?" suggested Captain Runacles.

"By all means, sir. My business is simple, but may require some
elucidation. May I suggest that Dr. Beckerleg accompanies us?
He is already acquainted with the drift of my commission, for reasons
I will expound hereafter."

"Of course. Come in, Doctor." He led the pair into his dining-room.
"I may as well state, Mr. Finch, that my temper is somewhat
impatient. If you come as a friend, my hospitality is yours for as
long as you care to use it; but I'd take it kindly if you came to the
heart of your business at once."

"To be sure, sir, and a very proper attitude. I plunge, then, into
the middle of affairs. You will doubtless remember Silvanus
Tellworthy, younger brother of the late Sir Jabez Tellworthy whose
virtues recently ceased to adorn this neighbourhood."

"Perfectly."

"His conscience led him to exchange this country, in the thirty-fifth
year of his age, for a soil more amical to his religious opinions."

"I have heard 'twas for fear of the attentions of a widow in Harwich;
but proceed."

"After amassing a considerable fortune he died, sir, of a paralytical
stroke, upon the 12th of November last."

"I am sorry to hear it."

"That was the common expression of Boston at the time. Dismissing
for a more leisurely occasion the consideration of his civic virtues,
I may say that I had the honour to possess his confidence in the
double capacity of friend and legal adviser. It fell to me to draw
up his will, some few years before his decease; and now I am left to
the task of giving it effect. He was a childless man, and, with the
exception of some trifling legacies to the town of Boston and a few
private friends, bequeathed his wealth to his only niece, Margaret,
daughter of the Sir Jabez Tellworthy already mentioned, and her
heirs."

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.